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In the Old Neighborhood With: Julie Dash; Home Is Where the Imagination Took Root

By FELICIA R. LEE

Published: December 3, 1997

The garbage was in the same spot, but the Beacon Theater down the street, where her mother took her to see a Brigitte Bardot film in the 1950's, was gone, as was the Loft's candy factory and its delicious perfume. The six-story brown buildings all looked smaller than she remembered, and the fences encircling the neat plots of grass weren't there in the old days.

Julie Dash, the filmmaker, was back at the Queensbridge Housing Project in Long Island City. For 18 years she lived with her mother, father and elder sister in apartment 3E at 40-07 Vernon Boulevard. It is a far different place from the one portrayed in her dreamy 1991 film ''Daughters of the Dust,'' set on her ancestral home of the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast.

''There used to be checker tables over there,'' she murmured, pointing to a bare patch of concrete. ''This used to be where we played double-dutch,'' she said, pointing to the entrance to her old building. ''I remember it being wider.''

The 46-year-old Ms. Dash lives in Los Angeles now and is still best known for the critically acclaimed ''Daughters,'' the first feature-length film by a black woman to have a national release. It has achieved almost cult status in some circles. In New York recently on the occasion of a writers conference for women and the release of her first novel, ''Daughters of the Dust,'' which continues the film's story, she detoured to Queensbridge after a 20-year absence.

''This was our little world: there was everything here,'' said Ms. Dash, who has movie-star looks but was dressed casually in black jeans, sneakers and a beret. ''All your friends, stores. There were people here who never went into Manhattan.''

For Ms. Dash, Queensbridge was a supportive place but one where dreams were often put aside because people could not imagine how to make them real. She said one of her fondest wishes was to visit a big office building because it seemed glamorous. Her parents -- her father was a garment district shipping clerk, her mother a saleswoman at Stern's -- didn't have time for outings to places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When she and her friends met a black Avon lady, they thought she was the height of sophistication.

Ms. Dash is a tall, big woman with a straightforward manner. One senses that she is a listener more than a talker, and that her nonsense antenna is usually fully extended.

''I see other filmmakers dealing with it, the fascination with the projects,'' she said as she sat on a bench near a basketball hoop. ''It's exotica. For me, I always dreamed of something else.''

''I think the project girls want to see something else,'' she said of her refusal to do a ''girls in the 'hood'' film with violence and a preoccupation with victimization. ''They want choices in life. They want to see themselves in other countries, doing important things, being counted.''

Ms. Dash's artistic vision was telegraphed in ''Daughters of the Dust,'' a complex story of a Gullah family narrated by an unborn child. The dialogue is in a rhythmic creole dialect called Geeche. The audience sees the turn-of-the-century family shaped both by its African past and the demands, both familial and social, of the present.

The film opened many doors in Hollywood that Ms. Dash refused to walk through because she felt the work she was offered called for a shallow, negative view of black life. ''Commerce,'' she calls it. ''Demystification.'' She has not had another widely distributed, critically acclaimed film. She has directed a video for Tracy Chapman that was nominated for a Grammy Award and has done films for Showtime and HBO. And she is hard at work on a second novel, a love story, and a screenplay about a woman who is a computer encryption specialist.

''I haven't been able to convince anyone to finance a film about a young African-American woman who's a computer genius,'' she said, irritated. ''I refuse to let anyone tell me what I can or cannot do. I'm tired of seeing films about ourselves as victims. I'm tired of seeing films about ourselves reacting to external forces. I hate the urban testosterone films. The dialogue is all 'yo, yo yo.' ''

''There is that, but there is also amazing wordplay that no one has captured yet,'' she said. ''I remember sitting here on these benches and talking to people, and the dreams, the plans, were amazing.

''I looked forward to living here the rest of my life,'' she said. ''I'd never been anywhere else. We didn't take vacations because we couldn't afford it.''

When she did leave, Ms. Dash wandered far and wide, to Amsterdam, London, Tokyo. She graduated from the City College of New York and went on to graduate school in film studies at the American Film Institute and the University of California at Los Angeles.

Some of the people from the old neighborhood still do not completely understand the life she now leads, she said. They call her at the home she shares with her 13-year-old daughter, N'zinga (Ms. Dash is divorced), and they don't get it when she tells them she is writing or lost in that dream state where characters walk in the room and do their thing.

It took her two and a half years to finish the novel, partly because she was struggling to make the transition from screenwriter to novelist. She put in eight-hour writing days, often every day. The novel is set in 1926 and the film's narrator, Elizabeth Peazant, is now a young woman who goes on a journey of discovery with her New York cousin, Amelia Varnes, who has a grant to trace their family's history.

''They wanted to know what I'd produced,'' she said with a laugh about those inquiring telephone calls. ''They are waiting for a big hit that appears at the mall.''

Ms. Dash believes that the big hit might just happen, but she says she is content in the meantime. It is a matter of black people putting up the money to finance their own projects, she said, and a matter of getting Hollywood to put its marketing dollars -- and its faith -- into offbeat black films or those not centered on hormone-driven adolescents.

''What makes them not believe?'' she asked with a shrug. '' 'Waiting to Exhale' made $100 million worldwide. Where's our 'English Patient?' Where's our 'Schindler's List?' Where's our 'Unbearable Lightness of Being?' I know alternative films are appreciated They are life-enhancing, if you will. I know how I feel when I see a good film.''

If there is any message that she wants to convey, it's that people who thirst for different images need not feel alone.

''I don't think I'm that unusual,'' she said. ''There are a lot of women making feature films in very unique and critical voices for African-American women. There's this illusion that there are one or two filmmakers and they're having a hard time.''

''We're not going away,'' she said. ''We're not going to stop making our films.''

Photo: Julie Dash, filmmaker and novelist, at the Queensbridge project where she grew up. (James Estrin/The New York Times)